InformationWeek has released its National IT Salary Survey with some very interesting results:

-Tech unemployment is under 3%

-Respondents do not think global competition will impact pay of experienced professionals.

-Respondents believe offshoring will impact entry-level salaries.

-Only 12% of staff and 9% of IT managers are insecure about their jobs.

-Salaries are not increasing that much but bonuses do make for an overall pay increase.

There has been so much negativity in the press and people’s opinions on employment in the tech sector yet almost every poll and survey show opposite results. For example, more professionals are employed now than right before the bubble burst in 2001.

While offshoring is on the mind most do not see it having a major impact on their career. From the article:

Maybe many of them work for bosses like Ron Strachan, CIO at HealthEast, a health care provider, who has yet to be sold on the idea that outsourcing or offshoring would pay off for his company. "I'm not a strong proponent of outsourcing and even less of offshoring," Strachan says. One in three people in the survey say their employers' send work offshore; half do either U.S. or offshore outsourcing.

Another reoccurring theme for IT professionals is to protect themselves from outsourcing and offshoring. I have written many times that professionals need to develop their business skills and be able to sit in on meetings, phone calls, etc. The days of coding in a corner cubicle with the Dominos and Mountain and never being bothered buy the “outside world” are over:

If they're working directly with customers or applying specific knowledge of the business, their jobs are unlikely to be outsourced. So the jobs of people doing straight programming are at risk, while application developers who know the technology and the business environment are in high demand. The same holds true with data mining and business intelligence expertise that's combined with knowledge of the business.

Interesting to find that employment is up, total wages are up, and offshoring/outsourcing is not having as much of an actual impact yet most do not see the career path as being all that great. So it is good for them but not for others to get in to:

Attitudes toward IT as a career path have improved in the last two years--though most in the profession still are down on it. Back in 2004, only 15% of staffers thought IT was as promising a career path as five years earlier. Today, 29% say it looks as good as five years ago. As for managers, 38% are as optimistic as they were five years ago, a better mood than we found two years ago. Still, 61% of staffers and 53% of managers now think the IT career path doesn't seem as promising as it did five years ago.

Nice way to end the article:

As it turns out, if the offshoring, the constantly changing skills, and the pressure of IT work don't get you, the uncertainty of it all just might.